Your body has incredible healing power. During the normal recovery process, it rebuilds tissue the way it was meant to work, without reacting to foreign substances. Sometimes, however, your immune system doesn’t respond quickly enough to repair damage. It needs some nudging to address your pain properly. Here at Parker Foot & Ankle, we use regenerative medicine to do just that.

Repair and Restore, All Naturally

Regenerative medicine works to provide your body with the stimulation and materials it needs to repair damage on its own, but more quickly. It’s a growing therapy field that involves several facets of healing. Each type of therapy works to maximize your natural immune system so that it responds to your pain more quickly and effectively. The main therapies we employ are amniomatrix, EPAT, and RNFA.

Building on Membrane Tissues

The amniomatrix is a special allograft, or material, that fills wounds to allow them to heal more quickly. It uses sterile, cryofrozen amniotic membrane tissue and some amniotic fluid to create a liquid “matrix” for your own tissues to build on top of as they regrow. Your wound, whether a diabetic ulcer or a surgery incision that isn’t recovering correctly, is filled with the product. The natural nutrients and factors that boost the immune system then help your own tissues as they grow and build on the graft.

Using Sound Waves to Lessen Pain

EPAT stands for extracorporeal pulse activation treatment. It’s an entirely noninvasive in-office therapy that stimulates your body’s healing responses. Our trained team directs focused pulses of high-frequency sound waves at the painful tissues. These pulses irritate the foot just enough to confuse the body into believing it has an injury that it needs to address immediately. Your immune system responds and floods the area with healing factors. This rapid response reduces the amount of time it takes for you to recover. This is particularly effective for chronic soft-tissue injuries like plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendinitis.

Turning Your Nerve Pain to “Off”

RNFA, or radio frequency nerve ablation, is a different technique to restore your feet to comfort. On rare occasions, problems like heel pain do not respond to any conservative therapies and continue to cause extreme discomfort. If all other avenues have been exhausted, treating the nerve attached to your heel and switching it “off” may provide you with significant relief. A probe is carefully inserted into your foot where the affected nerve is situated. The electrode on the end of the probe is turned on, allowing it to heat the nerve and impair its ability to send messages to the brain. This quickly relieves any discomfort you have been living with for an extended period of time.

Choosing the Therapy

These regenerative medicine treatments have been highly effective for many people. Dr. Robert Parker will determine if you qualify for these non-surgical therapies for pain relief. Usually these are reserved for situations where other conservative remedies have been exhausted. Our staff will use a variety of diagnostic tests to determine what therapies will best benefit your lower limbs and help you develop a treatment plan.

Regenerative medicine is a growing field with a variety of remedies for your chronic foot and ankle pain. These are valuable alternatives to surgery that use your own body to restore your lower limbs to comfort and health. If you’re struggling with stubborn foot and ankle discomfort, don’t give up and live with it—see how Parker Foot & Ankle in Houston can help you. Make an appointment or request more information from us by calling (281) 497-2850 or filling out the online request form.